Captain's Log, Stardate 2026.5. The USS FutureVision has docked at Space Station getgrav.org on a routine resupply of Markdown and good intentions. Within six hours, the cargo bay is full of Trilby's — small, flat, soft-billed file formats that purr when you open them in a text editor. They are multiplying. And somewhere in Colorado, a man named Andy is sensing a disturbance in the Twig.
Act I — The grain shipment
KIRK: Mr. Spock, report.
SPOCK: Captain, we accepted a consignment from the Trilby Media trading post — forty-seven kilos of Grav 1.7, flat-file CMS, MIT licensed. Standard cargo. Then the Chief brought aboard a specimen he calls Grav MUD.
McCOY: Jim, I'm a doctor, not a front-end framework — but whatever that .mud file is, it's alive. It's eating YAML and nesting ::: fences.
SPOCK: Fascinating. The MUD organism appears to be a symbiote — it does not replace Grav. It declares layout in plain text and compiles on onPageContentRaw. A design language. Human-readable. AI-editable. Disturbingly diff-friendly.
SCOTTY: Captain! The static exporter is runnin' hot! She's outputtin' flat HTML faster than I can say vendor/autoload.php!
KIRK: Easy, Scotty. How fast?
SCOTTY: Fifty-two kilobytes, sir. The whole spec overlay. The rest is Grav's problem. Which is to say — seventeen megabytes of PHP that actually does the work. The Trilby's are just along for the ride.
Act II — The breeding problem
UHURA: Captain, incoming transmission from Trilby Media. It's... polite.
KIRK: On screen.
(A man in a hat that may or may not be ironic appears.)
ANDY (RECORDED): We built Grav for speed, simplicity, and flexibility. Flat files. Markdown. Twig when you need it. We are this close to fifteen thousand GitHub stars and you walk in with NEXT Object Notation?
SPOCK: Captain, he is not angry. He is measuring threat surface. Trilby Media is the professional services arm of the same ecosystem. Our MUD is either competition or complement. Logic suggests complement — we ship on Grav, not instead of it.
McCOY: Spock, your ears are showing again. What the man in Colorado is feeling is existential. We took his religion — no database — and added fences. We took his Markdown and gave it layout primitives. We built a REVOLUTIONARY Static Site Exporter™ that lets agencies run Grav locally and ship HTML to cheap hosting. That's not a tribble. That's a tribble with a compiler.
CHEKOV: Keptin! The Trilby's have reached Deck Five — the blog! There is a post called "WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?!" and another about Code Designer! They are reproducing through .mud files!
KIRK: Bones — can anything stop them?
McCOY: Only one thing breeds faster than Trilby's on a starship: a Joomla fork expose site. We keep that in quarantine. This? This is Grav MUD. It's supposed to multiply — one page, one file, one ::: hero block at a time.
Act III — The Trouble with Trilby's (title drop)
SPOCK: Captain, I have consulted the getgrav.org archives. Official channels for contact:
- Trilby Media — hello@trilby.media — professional services, custom themes, the polite email
- GitHub — getgrav/grav — Andy Miller, @rhukster, Lead Developer
- Forum — discourse.getgrav.org — community tribble nest
- Discord — the chat room where someone will definitely say "just use Flex Pages"
KIRK: And our move?
SPOCK: We publish this dispatch. We offer the grav-mud-alpha-package.zip — fifty-two kilobytes of spec, not a CMS replacement. We run the static exporter on local servers only. We do not put it on cPanel cron. We have standards. Sort of.
KIRK: Spock, do you think Andy feels... threatened?
SPOCK: Captain, I believe Mr. Miller feels a wee bit of something between curiosity and the sudden urge to check his Flex Pages roadmap. The Trilby's are soft. They do not bite. They compile.
McCOY: Jim, I'm telling you — if we pitch this right, it's not The Trouble with Trilby's. It's "What if your content file also told the truth about layout?" Even a Vulcan would drink to that.
KIRK: Captain's Log, supplemental. We set out to build a human/AI design language for flat-file CMS. We may have accidentally written a Star Trek episode. The Trilby's are in the cargo bay, the Lab Notes are live, and somewhere Andy Miller is counting GitHub stars and wondering why Chief@gravmud.site exists.
Beam us up, Cursy. There's no page builder like no page builder.
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Epilogue (non-canonical):
FutureVision Labs is not affiliated with Trilby Media, Paramount, CBS, or any hat manufacturer. Grav MUD is a PoC / pitch fork. Andy is probably fine. BAAAAAAHAHAHA. 8)
Read next: Why Grav MUD? · Get Started + Static Exporter · Back to Lab Notes